MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) are internet adventure games with no real end. The point of most of these games is to quest for experience to gain skill levels and explore vast virtual worlds filled with monsters and other players.

In some of the more popular MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft, you can learn profitable in-game trade skills, gather valuable resources from the land, and participate in functioning economies with in-game auction houses. However, even in a virtual world of magic and mythical races, you aren’t safe from the long arm of government.

Over the past 15 years or so, virtual property and income in online games have attracted the eye of governments for taxation. When virtual money and items become traded with real money, then monetary value is assessed to those items. There is currently a black market for in-game currency and items, traded online for real money.

Governments are looking at ways to justify taxing virtual items because they now have real-world value, even if they exist only on a server somewhere. With this inevitable tax comes intrusive and overbearing regulation. More bureaucracy and less freedom; that’s always a good thing, right?

The JEC [Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress] statement said: “Clearly, virtual economies represent an area where technology has outpaced the law. The goal of the forthcoming JEC study is to help lawmakers understand the issues involved and head off any premature attempt to impose a tax on virtual economies.”

Note the statement: “premature attempt to impose a tax.” That doesn’t say they don’t intend to tax; it says that they eventually want to try.

Virtual property and income legislation is the camel’s nose under the tent for more government control by necessitating regulation and enforcement in virtual worlds. What happens when they extend their regulation to issues outside of enforcing tax compliance?

Here are a couple of examples of breaking the law in regard to virtual games: account hacking and identity theft. Both are traditionally handled outside of the game because they’re considered actual crimes. However, once government is involved in any aspect of virtual worlds, a question of jurisdiction is raised.

Right now, in-game “crimes” are handled by game companies at their own discretion. In-game crimes are usually defined as petty pranks or breaches of terms-of-service agreements. If players begin to appeal to the government for in-game incidents, then government will have to decide what constitutes actual crimes because they would be indirectly involved in game regulation.

20 Comments, 20 Threads

You’ve got to be kidding me. All the stuff my lvl 60 dwarf guardian has built up in Lord of the Rings Online could be taxed? And when I save Middle-Earth are you statists gonna give me a tax credit or something?

It ain’t only gamers that have too much time on their hands. It’s all the sick nerds in the government.

Nothing bugs our lords and masters ( er, I mean dedicated public servants) more than seeing something they don’t control. This drives them nuts.

They immediately set out to find Something Wrong With It. It’s violent. It’s fattening. It uses too much energy. It threatens the environment of the speckled marmadilch. Disrespects the ethnic sensibilities of Homo erectus. But they will not stop until it’s caught in a web of ( mostly unintelligible) rules, laws, and lawsuits. And taxes, taxes and more taxes.

And then they absolutely wonder why our factories and IT industry shipped out to Asia.

No group is more greedy than government. Many people cry about the oil companies but its government that makes more off a gallon of gas. In America the government already makes more than it needs. They use it to pay for teaching drunk hookers in Asia and socialist programmes. More than 1/2 of my paycheck to pay taxes. I don’t play mmo games so this tax wouldn’t affect me. But what other tax will they dream up to control some other aspect of life next? It is out of hand and needs to be reigned in.

No wonder people have a problem dealing with reality. Even governments seem to not know the difference between real and pretend.

(dictionary.com)
re⋅al⋅i⋅ty [ree-al-i-tee] Show IPA
–noun, plural -ties for 3, 5–7.
1. the state or quality of being real.
2. resemblance to what is real.
3. a real thing or fact.
4. real things, facts, or events taken as a whole; state of affairs: the reality of the business world; vacationing to escape reality.
5. Philosophy.
a. something that exists independently of ideas concerning it.
b. something that exists independently of all other things and from which all other things derive.
6. something that is real.
7. something that constitutes a real or actual thing, as distinguished from something that is merely apparent.
—Idiom
8. in reality, in fact or truth; actually: brave in appearance, but in reality a coward.

pre⋅tend [pri-tend]
–verb (used with object)
1. to cause or attempt to cause (what is not so) to seem so: to pretend illness; to pretend that nothing is wrong.
2. to appear falsely, as to deceive; feign: to pretend to go to sleep.
3. to make believe: The children pretended to be cowboys.
4. to presume; venture: I can’t pretend to say what went wrong.
5. to allege or profess, esp. insincerely or falsely: He pretended to have no knowledge of her whereabouts.
–verb (used without object)
6. to make believe.
7. to lay claim to (usually fol. by to): She pretended to the throne.
8. to make pretensions (usually fol. by to): He pretends to great knowledge.
9. Obsolete. to aspire, as a suitor or candidate (fol. by to).
–adjective
10. Informal. make-believe; simulated; counterfeit: pretend diamonds.

How can you lay claim to something that does not exist? I guess the same way you can spend money you don’t have and will never have ie trillons of dollars, and the same way you can claim something has happened when it didn’t ie jobs saved by the stimulus.

Well they can tax my online wealth and I will pay them with my online gold. Nothing from nothing still equals nothing, but hey I’m a mage so I’ll throw in some arcane explosions along with my payments. That ought to spice things up a bit.

Yet another reason for the Fair Tax. Still, I was under the impression that items produced for personal consumption are exempt from taxation; for instance, you don’t tax a farmer for the market value of the crops that he and his family eat, only what he sells is taxed. What this illustrates is that the Internet is the Wild West; we pretty much make up the rules as we go along, because attempting to apply laws not designed for the Internet to the Internet often results in nonsense.

Heck you didn’t even get into the really NASTY in game things that EVE ONLINE allows, and even celebrates!

How about a “Hostile Takeover” that involves infiltrating people into several layers of a corporation and even paying off the VP of said corp. Then on a given signal clean out the corporations bank accounts, it’s physical assests, and then assinate the President of the corporation? If I recall correctly that was over 3.2 TRILLION ISK worth of loss in that heist. Real world money value at the time? $32,000. Not bad for a year’s work eh?

What did CCP, the Icelandic creators of the game do? They published the entire affair and showed how it proved how player driven their game was.

If the government has their way CCP and EVE Online are toast easy. It allows players too much freedom. Heck look at their entire banking, stock, and economy!

These games must be taxed and attacked by our over reaching arms. This cannot do, the government has spent lots of hard earned money around teaching the youth of america. They cannot have these games running around teaching them free market capitalism. The people need to understand that wealth is created by government, not hard work.